Could We Be Ready For the Anti-Obama?

In 2008, the country voted for someone with a promise of “hope and change,” someone that gave a lot of promises to everyone—many more than he could possibly fulfill.

Will the country be ready for someone whose only promises would be less debt, less spending and less taxes in 2012? And who would have that kind of track record?

Enter Mitch Daniels – “Mitch the Knife”. The current governor of Indiana is extremely well connected, but he’s nowhere near as elegant as Obama:

Republican admirers from Washington, Indiana and elsewhere, hoping to encourage their favorite Hoosier, are out in force to make the case that a balding, blunt, unprepossessing, listed-at-5-foot-7 policy wonk would be a strong contender to take on President Barack Obama. Their shorthand is that he’s the un-Obama. If the country has soured on a charismatic orator who brought glamour but little executive experience to the presidency, the thinking goes, then Daniels could provide the antidote.

“Do we want a president that’s pretty, or do we want one who can get the job done?” is how Anne Hathaway, a former Republican National Committee chief of staff who is now back in her native Indiana, puts it.

And since winning the governorship in 2004, he has practiced the sort of fiscal conservatism that he preached as “The Blade” during his tenure as President George W. Bush’s head of the Office of Management and Budget.

“Mitch is the real thing,” said Nancy Dorn, his deputy at OMB and now the head of General Electric Co.’s Washington office. “He’s a true fiscal conservative.”

He has cut spending, cut taxes, leased the state’s toll road to a private company for billions and expanded health insurance and prescription drug access in a market-friendly way. The result is an approval rating of 70 percent, according to one recent survey, placing him among the country’s most popular governors. [‘Mitch the knife’ eyes 2012 run – Politico]

He sounds like he’d actually be a well qualified individual who could do a good job… so that probably means he won’t run, or wouldn’t make it past the primaries.

I hear you, Leticia, but right now– if we don’t get our act together– our biggest worry is that our country will have a economic meltdown and we’ll lose even more freedoms domestically. I have a hard time feeling worried about Afghanistan, etc., when I realize that this very country may end up socialist.